[XPERIA X10 Android Development] biktor_gj:
Well, actually yes and no. They have two platforms, one based on qsd8k and the other one on msm7k. So projects need to be splitted, the same happens with timescape & mediascape. They share the name, and maybe the same team works for both platforms, but projects are different for each, since all the UI is different, and on the mini, for example, they have to sacrifice some things because of the screen and the available memory.

Seeing the way things have gone so far, I wouldn't trust that much. The first official firmware (.014) had quite a lot major flaws. Example? Battery draining in less than 14 hours with everything disabled, memory leaks, crashes on timescape & mediascape, and please don't make me talk about the most important thing, the keyboard. I spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out how to press the screen to write a simple A. Until I switched to android's default keyboard.

After we released fota patch for rooting the phone, quite a lot of fota updates started showing everywhere. When we did it we were on R1FA016 if I recall, Today we are on R2BA026. People at sonyericsson are more worried on preventing us from hijacking the platform, than really giving people a good user experience, which should be the most important thing. (after all, as Chewitt said, we are fewer people)

Note that I don't blame SE developers for this, it's a company decission, not from developers themselves. I think they even use a different bootloader (usbloader) to test their phones, and then lock them down with s1 loader to prevent us from doing the same ;) (nice try btw :P)

Actually we started on the big x10 because mini hadn't started shipping. After it started showing up bin4ry didn't need much time to port the fota crack to it ;) And the dirty chroot hack I'm attempting should also be compatible with the mini & mini pro with minimal adjustments... Another thing is splboot & usbloader, which depend on qsd8k architecture and would need substantial rewriting on the code to work on the mini...

Well, I want to see eclair running on the x10, but just because the new kernel will be based on 2.6.32, and changes between eclair and froyo are minimal (compared to donut & eclair), so we could get froyo faster. Sony Ericsson firmwares look like viruses to me. I would accept the hidden music and gallery apps with mediascape replacement if it worked fine, but I don't even change my wallpaper anymore because I can't stand going through mediascape, photos, libraries, look for the folder, try to open an image, go back, because it went to recent images god knows why, touch again the image to see if it loads the one I want, then add, as a wallpaper. That's not the way things should work. Android is developed to be simple to the end user, and mediascape is tedious, difficult, even for me that I'm not a simple user. In fact I don't know anyone who actually likes mediascape. You know what does one of SE execs from my country has? a Samsung Galaxy S. I think I said enough.

And what to say about Timescape. If we're doing dirty hacks, I don't know how to call that abomination. It's linked on several parts of the framework. It's slow, buggy as hell, and they hacked half of the android subsystem to make it work. So now if you remove it everything falls apart. And the worst of all. Why the hell do SE think everyone on this planet uses Facebook? I haven't had an account in my life, and you can't remove it completely!

It's a fact that SE doesn't like people touching their things. That can be understood if they did a good work software side. Reality is they don't. And Cyanogenmod builds are much more stable than any firmware Sony Ericsson has shipped for this phone.